Thomas Heise’s four-hour documentary draws on the journals of his own family to construct a powerful, agonising history
The 63-year-old German film-maker and dramatist Thomas Heise has created what may possibly come to be seen as his masterpiece. I was sometimes captivated but often frustrated by this epic essay-film, a meditation on
Germany and his own family history that is stark, fierce, austerely cerebral and almost four hours long.
Using letters and journals from his parents and grandparents (his father was the philosopher and academic Wolfgang Heise, his grandfather the literary critic and teacher Wilhelm Heise), he recounts an agonised story of his own Jewish background, and his forebears’ experience of antisemitism in the Nazi era and then later a queasily similar pattern of bullying from the Communist party authorities in East Germany.